David Alan Grier is a historian of mathematics & computing and Professor at George Washington University. He is the author of When Computers Were Human (Princeton University Press, 2005), a landmark study of the pre-electronic mathematical workforce, and has written widely on the history of numerical analysis, the professionalization of computing, and the social foundations of mathematical practice. He served as President of the IEEE Computer Society and has written a long-running column for IEEE Computer magazine on the public understanding of technology. His work has shaped how historians understand the relationship between mathematical labor, institutional authority, and the rise of the digital computer.
In this conversation, we discuss why the human computing workforce never translated its labor into prestige for the field it built, where computing's intellectual authority actually came from, and John von Neumann's outsized role in giving computing its identity as a theoretical discipline.
